CFEngine can do wonders to keep a cluster in shape, but it can be very useful for a single server as well. Here is a configuration sample to monitor a few common services and restart them should they fail.

In this post we’ll install CFEngine on a Debian system. Debian make is really simple to install any packages, so let’s follow the “standard” package installation procedure (I’ll assume that apt is correctly setup on your system ! If you have troubles with it, let me know, I’ll write a post on this topic).

CFEngine is a configuration management engine. I’m going to write a series of short posts as I’m going to use CFEngine in a current project. Let’s start with a short description of CFEngine purpose and main features.

Cfengine is a tool which purpose is to describe what is a healthy system and how to bring it back to normal when something fails.

I won’t go into an explanation about how cfengine works, because the project webpage already has a neat tutorial and complete reference. Instead of that, I’ll explain how I used cfengine to build a fool proof Linux firewall.